C. Dale Brittain_Wizard of Yurt 04

by The Witch;the Cathedral

  "I need the air cart," I said in the husky voice that was the best I could manage.

  Without a far-seeing attachment I couldn't see him, but he could see me. He drew in his breath in a sharp gasp. "Where are you? Aren't you home in Yurt? What have you been doing to yourself?"

  "I've been fighting a monster in Caelrhon. I don't know what it is, but it must be from the northern land of wild magic."

  The foreman of the construction crew had slipped into the office with us. I wondered rather distantly if I should suspect him. "It was a fanged gorgos," he said quietly.

  "It was a fanged gorgos," I repeated for Zahlfast, wondering with mild curiosity if there was also a non-fanged variety; if so I doubted it would be a substantial improvement. "But it isn't one any more. That's why I need the air cart; I need to get it back north before it breaks out of the transformations spell."

  "Out of the what?"

  "I turned it into a frog."

  And then Zahlfast said something I had never heard him say before. "Dear God." He paused for several seconds. I wished again I could see his face. "You realize, transformations spells don't work against creatures of wild magic."

  "Yes, I know. I remembered after I did it. I used a summoning spell at the same time as the transformations spell. Please don't be angry; I know you never wanted us young wizards to know summoning, but I learned the spell years ago."

  "Used the summoning spell," said Zahlfast slowly.

  "And now I think I've destroyed all my own magic. I couldn't say another spell to save my own life, which may not last long anyway."

  "Nonsense," said Zahlfast in something closer to his usual brisk tone. "You're just worn out. I'll send the air cart at once." But he paused then and added, "Have you remembered my warning?"

  "Yes," I said wearily. At this point I neither knew nor cared whether priests hated and feared wizardry, but I did know that if Joachim wanted to destroy me I would do nothing to stop him.

  Paul sat beside me, offering me drinks of water and brandy and ineffectually straightening the blanket while we waited for the doctor. He felt guilty, I guessed, for having believed, even momentarily, that I might have called the gorgos myself. "You know," he said, "I'm not sure I'd ever seen you really using your magical powers before. I've heard of course about your fight with the dragon, but that was before I was even born."

  If I was going to serve Paul when he was king of Yurt, I thought, maybe it was just as well he realized that a Royal Wizard could do more than just after-dinner illusions.

  "Thank you for standing up to Lucas," I told him. "Usually a wizard can defend himself, but I certainly couldn't now."

  "I'm almost sorry Father Joachim stopped us," he said with a grin and a quick look across the room to make sure we were not over­ heard. "It would have been my first real fight." But then he became more sober. "Can that frog really be a transformed monster?"

  I had continued to cling to the frog. It stared at me with vicious eyes. "It is indeed. I don't know if you heard what I said on the telephone, but I'm going to take it back to the land of wild magic."

  "Then I'll go with you!" said Paul in a joyous shout. "What better way to finish my minority than helping our Royal Wizard destroy a monster? I've wanted to go on a quest since I was eight years old, and this time no one will stop me!"

  Lucas came and stood over me, fists on his hips. "What makes you think this wizard really does plan to destroy his gorgos," he demanded of Paul, "if he hasn't just hidden it somewhere and substituted a frog to deceive us? Don't you think it more likely that he is planning to call up even more monsters?"

  I squinted at him suspiciously from under half-closed eyelids. Lucas had seen the monster before any of us. Even if this was merely due to excellent eyesight, he had certainly moved rapidly to take advantage of the opportunity to discredit me.

  The dean looked across at him. "Then go with him, Prince," he suggested.

  Startled, I pushed myself up on an elbow. Although I had certainly not planned to take Lucas with me, if I did I could keep an eye on him. And it might be good for him to see how useful and indeed necessary wizards were for the western kingdoms. "Go pack some clean socks," I told him quickly, "and blankets and enough food for all of us for two weeks."

  Lucas hesitated, a hard curl to his lip. But he was rapidly losing the momentum that would allow him to refuse. "Do you not think it your duty?" the dean asked him sternly. "Do you not, as royal heir, need to witness the destruction of a monster that almost destroyed the major city of your kingdom?"

  "Of course, Father," Lucas said, flustered and scowling.

  The two princes started to leave together, then Paul stopped. "Wizard! Is there going to be room for Bonfire?"

  "Of course there isn't going to be room for a horse," I said in exasperation. "Tell the knights from Yurt to exercise your stallion every day, and he'll be fine. And send a message to your mother to tell her where we're going. Give her everyone's love."

  The doctor arrived as the princes clattered out. He clucked over me, putting ointment on the burns and pronouncing none of my ribs cracked, after an examination that I was convinced cracked several.

  As he left again and the dean prepared to follow, I put a hand on the latter's arm. At least the bishop's death and the monster's attack seemed to have made Joachim lose track of whatever embarrassing questions he might once have been going to ask me about how the cathedral cantor came to be struck in the rear by a book of spells. "What do you expect me to do with Prince Lucas?" I demanded.

  He cocked an eyebrow at me. "I have no idea. But if he did not go he would be here, worrying the cathedral chapter about the election of the new bishop, becoming increasingly irritable because he did not leap as Paul did at the kind of adventure he thinks is the function of the aristocracy. His younger brother would have needed no such prodding. And I have noticed this about you, Daimbert. You are at your best when everyone has been caught off balance, because you improvise better than anyone." At the moment I felt at my worst, but I did not interrupt. "You need to talk to Prince Lucas, to find out why he is accusing you of a wizardly conspiracy, and now will be your chance."

  "But suppose he had refused to go?"

  "It is his duty. And after he announced himself as protector of the Church, he could not very well refuse a suggestion from the man who is now the most powerful religious leader in the twin kingdoms."

  I lay back down again. "I'm sorry," I said. "I'm sorry the bishop died, and I'm sorry I set your tower on fire."

  He looked at me a moment and nodded gravely without speaking.

  "Thank you for saving me from Lucas and from a riot."

  Joachim gave me another long look. He did not smile, but at least his face looked as though he might once before have smiled in his life. "Thank you for saving us all from the monster. If Prince Lucas wants to incite a riot, he will have to do better than that." Then he was gone.

  When at last, toward dusk, the air cart landed in front of the cathedral, I hobbled out to it with Paul's support. Several hours' sleep had made me feel, if not exactly better, at least as though living might be worthwhile. The art cart was the winged skin of a purple flying beast that had originally come, long ago, from the northernmost land of magic. Even after the beast had died its skin kept on flying if governed by magic commands.

  Paul looked at the frog to which I continued to cling. "Why don't you just kill it here?"

  "You're welcome to try. But don't cut the rope."

  Paul set the frog on the paving stones and hesitated, his sword in his hand. I could tell he did not like killing a helpless creature. But he trusted me, and in a moment he lifted his blade and drove it down against the kicking green form.

  His sword sprang back so abruptly it was jerked from his grip. Paul recovered it with a startled look. "What have you done to this frog? Its skin is made of iron!"

  "That's what I was afraid of," I said. "You can't really transform creatures of wild magic. Spells are the orderly cha
nneling of magical forces, but creatures like this cut right across order. The gorgos is now no bigger than a frog and looks like a frog, but I'm afraid it's still a gorgos."

  "But is it going to start looking and acting like a monster again?"

  "I hope not—or at least not right away. That's why I need to get it back to the land of magic before it can recover its powers." I wondered sourly just how powerful the hidden wizard here might be, whether his magic might even be strong enough to bind two separate monsters at the same time. In that case, he might bring out the second while I was off taking care of the first. But I forced myself to dismiss the thought. If my opponent was that good, there was nothing I could do about it.

  In the bottom of the air cart was a small box, absolutely black. I tried a gentle probing spell, the first spell of any sort I had tried for hours. It was a binding box, set about with spells to secure whatever was in it. Zahlfast must have decided to include it. I pushed the frog inside and slammed the lid.

  Paul boosted me over the edge of the cart, and Lucas climbed in without a word. While I was searching for the words of the Hidden Language to guide the cart, a short, wiry figure came toward us from the huts. It was the foreman of the construction crew.

  He leaned casually against the side of the cart, not quite looking at me. A pack was slung over his back. "So you're going up to the land of magic," he said at last. "Have you ever been there?"

  "No." Normally I would have tried to justify or explain, but now the monosyllable sufficed.

  There was another pause. "Would you like a guide?"

  There was more here, I thought, than helpful concern for a confused wizard, but I was too tired to work it out. "Have you been there?"

  "Not right up in the wild magic. But I come from the borderlands."

  "Borderlands?" asked Paul.

  "Of course, lad. You don't think the western kingdoms stop at a line on the map and the land of magic starts right there, do you? There's a stretch of territory several hundred miles wide in which the lands of men and the land of magic penetrate each other. Some places you can go just a few miles from an ordinary village to the castle of a will-o'-the-wisp."

  Paul's face lit up. "It would be like stepping into fairyland!"

  I kept a dignified silence. "Well," said the foreman, "do you want a guide or not?"

  "Of course," I said. The foreman could prove useful, and I wanted to know how he had recognized a fanged gorgos. "But aren't you needed here?"

  "I've been talking to the provost, and he seems to feel there's no use trying to get much work done in the next few weeks, before the new bishop is elected. My lads can repair on their own the damage the gorgos did to the tower."

  "Then climb in," I said. "It's time to start."

  IV

  Dusk rose from the narrow streets of the city, punctuated only at intervals by the yellow gleam of lanterns, even while the sky above us was still pale blue. Laden with two princes, a wizard, a construction foreman, and a transformed monster, the air cart rose gracefully, spun around twice, and headed north. Though it flew no faster than I normally could, in my present exhausted state I could never have made the trip unaided, especially carrying a monstrous frog.

  As the city dropped away behind us I leaned on the edge of the cart, looking back as intently as though I might be able to see Theodora from this height. I had not seen her for forty-eight hours.

  If she had not been kidnapped, she must be hiding from me deliberately. But how would she have been so warm one day and flee me the next? Her reserve, the private inner thoughts to which I had only sometimes felt admitted, now took on an ominous interpretation. She was, after all, a witch. Had she never loved me at all, only set out to distract me while her partner in evil, the hidden wizard, brought his gorgos to Caelrhon?

  I gritted my teeth until my jaw ached. I could have sworn she loved me as much as I loved her.

  "So you've got the gorgos in the box," said the foreman, leaning next to me, his long fingers folded over each other. I forced myself to stop thinking of Theodora. Cool air streamed by our faces. Everyone was avoiding the black box; Lucas especially made sure to stay on the far side of the air cart from it.

  "That's right, and I hope I can keep it there until we reach somewhere I dare let it free. You know, I'm afraid I don't even know your name."

  "Call me Vor," he said with a quick, sideways look that made me wonder if this really was his name.

  "All right, Vor, maybe you can give me some suggestions what to do with an indestructible gorgos."

  "First you have to decide," he said slowly, "whether you particularly want it dead."

  I hadn't thought about it in those terms. "I would have killed it if I could," I said, "to keep it from attacking the people in the city, but I don't think I can. That's why I'm taking it north. If I let it go, do you think it will return to its gorgos shape and come back to Caelrhon again?"

  "But you don't want to kill it out of revenge for nearly killing you?"

  I looked at the motionless black box, a more solid piece of darkness inside the dark air cart, and wondered hopefully if the monster had suffocated. But Vor seemed to be asking something more. "No, I'm not interested in revenge."

  Vor nodded as though I had clarified an important point. Below us dim hills and valleys streamed by. The air cart was high enough that it only had to rise for the steepest hills. Tiny figures of men and horses were coming in from the fields to villages where firelight welcomed them. No one looked up to see us.

  "You can't actually kill a gorgos," Vor said at last. "Or, if you do, they're even worse dead than they are alive. I knew a man once who decided to kill one out of vengeance. Once it was dead it took possession of him, mind and body."

  He fell silent then. I decided that I was happier not knowing the details and started putting together the spell to slow the flight of the air cart. "We must have come over fifty miles already," I told the two princes. "We'll camp in a field tonight and fly on in the morning."

  It took us over a week of flying to reach the borderlands of the land of magic. The air cart did much of the flying on its own, needing only a steady low-level attention from my own spells to keep its flight smooth and on course. At first much of the land we crossed was rolling hills and farmland, similar to that of the kingdoms of Yurt and Caelrhon, but as we went north the season seemed to retreat, so that we started seeing again flowers that had already passed in the fields outside the cathedral city. Then we began to cross dense forests, where only occasionally we saw a track that might have been made by humans, and rocky, barren stretches where there were very few farms.

  For most of the trip the weather was fair, and we flew during the day with the wind in our hair and slept under the sky at night. The stars were much brighter in the thin northern air, away from the smoke of the city, than I ever remembered seeing them. But one day it rained steadily for nearly twenty-four hours. I was able to rig a spell to keep us dry while the air cart flew on, but that night we had to overturn the cart in a partially successful attempt to keep the rain off, and all of us slept uneasily.

  Being cramped in a small space all day was especially hard for Paul. Every evening, as soon as the cart touched down, he was off running, sometimes for as much as an hour. Prince Lucas, gathering fuel the first night for a fire to try to stew up some of the dried beef he had brought along, grumbled that the other prince was deliberately shirking his responsibilities, until Paul came back with fresh bread and lettuce bought from a farm house over the hill.

  Vor exercised by walking on his hands, doing bends and twists of which I would not have thought the human body capable. Prince Lucas practiced swordplay against his shadow. I, still recovering from my wounds, mostly worried about the gorgos frog.

  Paul and I sat by a small fire one evening, watching the sun set behind the graceful branches of an oak. He was back from his run but the others were still gone. The heir to the throne of Yurt pulled off his boots, stretched, scratched, and flopped back
cheerfully on the grass. I found myself imagining that if I had met the queen on one of her trips to the City, back when I was a wizardry student and she still only a castellan's daughter, he might have been our son.

  A stream gurgled nearby, and the grass on which we sat was intertwined with wild flowers. "You know," I said to Paul, "we'll probably never see this spot again."

  This didn't seem to bother him. "There are a lot of nice places," he said lazily, "many of them in Yurt. But traveling like this has made me want to travel more, to see all the beautiful spots in the world. Mother makes a good regent; maybe I'll just let her rule Yurt a few years more."

  I did not like at all the idea of him taking off across the western kingdoms, but I let this pass in silence, hoping he would forget it as quickly as he had forgotten wanting to become a wizard.

  "This is silly," Paul added after a moment, abruptly serious and looking off into the distance. "I'm going to be king very soon. I know I don't have the wisdom Father had, and I don't think I have the courage of Uncle Dominic, who loved Yurt more than his own life. He might even in other circumstances have become king instead of me. What do you think, Wizard, do I want to travel only because I'm afraid I won't be an adequate king? But then you've probably never known what it's like to feel unworthy of your position."

  There was no possible way to answer this. I watched the flickering of our fire for a minute, feeling the evening air grow chill around us. "We've come so far and so fast," I said, "over land that none of us know. Sometimes I wonder if we'll ever find our way home again."

  But this didn't bother Paul. "Of course we will," he said, cheerful again, lying on his back, supporting his hips on his hands and kicking long legs into the darkening sky. "If we get lost, all we have to do is go west until we reach the ocean, and then follow the coast south to the great City. It's easy enough to get home to Yurt from there."

  He was right, of course, but as the days went by I kept feeling that I was astray in a strange world, with no landmarks and no way to find my way back to the world I had always taken for granted.